Some of you may wonder what the significance is of the spider’s web on my home page. It seems appropriate today, as I look at a particularly large spider setting off on a journey across the outside of my office window, to share the background to this graphic!As Chair of the York based section of ‘The Women’s Business Group’ I took part in a particularly powerful and thought provoking workshop on Metaphor run by the wonderful Sally Ashworth of The Naburn Partnership. Sally is a very proficient and skilled NLP practitioner and she ran the session to help the group work up a metaphor and image to summarise the wonderful mix of talents which make up the York group. Our initial task seemed very simple, to identify a metaphor which we felt represented us and our own business and after much thought I decided that a spider’s web would be my metaphor. Why a spider's web? Well they are incredibly strong, cleverly designed to provide a simple ‘A to B’ route, but so often almost invisible unless the light shines on them in a particular way. The systems which I build for my client base are, I hope, very similar to this. Strong and cleverly designed, cleverly designed to be simple to use and hopefully structured so that they don’t ‘hit you in the face’ but just get on and do what needs to be done, without any fuss. I was pretty proud of my metaphor, and as a result of that session the web has appeared on my business cards (cleverly behind my ‘web’ address – oh that raised groans from my daughter) and now it’s on my website. What metaphor would be appropriate for your business? Go on, give it a thought – you might surprise yourself, I know I did.